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    Beyond Freeways: Community, Commerce, and Contention along Los Angeles's 710 Corridor
    Beyond Freeways: Community, Commerce, and Contention along Los Angeles's 710 Corridor
    Beyond Freeways: Community, Commerce, and Contention along Los Angeles's 710 Corridor
    Ebook60 pages45 minutes

    Beyond Freeways: Community, Commerce, and Contention along Los Angeles's 710 Corridor

    By Justin Gerdes

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    About this ebook

    This is a report on the continuing controversy over Los Angeles officialdom's obsession with expanding and extending the 710 freeway corridor to accommodate freight traffic from the ports, despite the harm it already causes communities along the route, and in spite of the alternatives offered to more-of-the-same.

    Investigative reporter Justin Gerdes and photo/video documentarian Leila Dee Dougan interview area residents, activists, transportation agency administrators, elected officers, and logistics entrepreneurs, and uncover a story of bureaucratic arrogance and grassroots desperation in the effort to roll back decades of harm imposed on the mostly poor communities along the freeway. Though it is one of the region's premier source of air pollution and traffic congestion, proposals for cleaner and more efficient facilities, and for rethinking how goods and people move through the region, are conscientiously ignored. Murky financial estimates also play a part in the story.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichard Risemberg
    Release dateApr 10, 2014
    ISBN9781310618901
    Beyond Freeways: Community, Commerce, and Contention along Los Angeles's 710 Corridor
    Author

    Justin Gerdes

    Justin Gerdes is an independent journalist specializing in energy and the environment based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared at the Guardian, Yale Environment 360, Forbes.com, MotherJones.com, Smithsonian.com, Chinadialogue, the Christian Science Monitor, Ensia, and GreenBiz.com, among others. Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JustinGerdes

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      Book preview

      Beyond Freeways - Justin Gerdes

      Beyond Freeways...

      Community, Commerce, and Contention

      along Los Angeles’s 710 Corridor

      By Justin Gerdes

      Photographs and additional reporting by Leila Dee Dougan

      Edited and with an Introduction by Richard Risemberg

      Produced by Richard Risemberg and eByline

      Copyright 2013, 2014 Richard Risemberg

      Smashwords Edition

      Thank you for purchasing this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. With permission, this book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes only, provided the book remains in its complete and in its original form. Please encourage others to purchase their own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the journalists.

      For permission to republish this work in whole or in part, contact Richard Risemberg at rickrise@earthlink.net.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      I: Birth of an Asphalt Monster

      The 710 Corridor in Los Angeles County

      II: The Beast that Eats Our Children

      Health Effects of the 710

      III: Riding to the Rescue

      IV: The Price to Pay

      And the Funny Money Proposed to Pay It

      About the Contributors

      Credits & Acknowledgements

      Connect with the Authors

      Introduction

      By Richard Risemberg

      All the physical constructs of a culture are born into nests of perceptions. For the 710 freeway in the eastern third of Los Angeles County, those were perceptions of infinities: an infinity of real estate, an infinity of air, an infinity of oil, an infinity of time to spend in traffic...an infinity of public health to absorb the poisons, stress, and dullness of life in the shadow of its roaring traffic. Of course the infinities filled up with choking smog, blanketing noise, and congested roadways, and they became instead a prison guarded by an asphalt dragon.

      In the flush of a delusional lust for the automobile, we built a corridor that kills its children and depresses its economies. Sometime in the late 20th century, Lewis Mumford said that Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity. Los Angeles has spent the last sixty years proving him right. Relentlessly building more streets, more highways, more freeways has led not to free-flowing wind-in-the-hair drives, but to the worst traffic jams in the country, perhaps the world: a twice-a-day stasis of inert and frustrated drivers sitting alone in their sequestering boxes, listening to hate-radio rants as they squeeze along asphalt channels…. The beast they thought they’d ride to freedom instead digests them, squeezing them out at the end bereft of human spirit.

      In an era of global warming, peak oil, obesity, stress, and foundering economies, it becomes imperative to find better ways to move ourselves, and our goods, among our neighborhoods. More specifically, if we wish to keep the economy we favor in this country and remain somewhat human, we must move as much transport as possible to modes such as rail, which uses one-third the fuel and orders of magnitude less land than individual motor vehicles do to move goods and people alike.

      Yet, in an era where cities from Seoul to San Francisco to New York are tearing down freeways and finding that, contrary to gut feelings, traffic flows more smoothly, economies flourish, and neighborhoods burgeon, Los Angeles finds itself almost alone in trying to extend and expand a freeway through the heart of the region.

      The excuse here is freight traffic from the port. This series, by environmental reporter Justin Gerdes and documentary photographer and videographer Leila Dee Dougan, will investigate the premises and promises of differing visions for the 710 corridor and its communities, and how it grew into its present form.

      In the interests of full disclosure, let me state that I am presently an unpaid officer of GRID Logistics Inc, a company mentioned in this series. My interest in

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